Deer Luhan,

I hate deadlines.

Leigh

“…This one’s like the one streaming to camera A,” Yi continued enthusiastically, tapping the computer nearest me.  “Not as light as the—”  He said some name I didn’t have a hope of pronouncing, let alone understanding, and then launched into a list of specs and stats while I munched on a croissant I’d nicked from the hotel restaurant after the EXO boys had left to go and meet with the city mayor.  It didn’t compare to croissants I’d had on my limited trips across the Channel Tunnel, but I understood the French more than I currently understood what Yi was talking about, and that was saying something.

Yi with his drones was like a gamer you’d accidentally asked to tell you what his favourite game was and why, or a Warhammer buff you’d made the mistake of complimenting on his collection of miniatures who then launched into an unwanted explanation of wound charts and hit points.  All I’d really taken from the past two and a half hours was that Yi had fourteen drones flying over the city, the majority of which were silent, and that his baby was some version of the Stalker UAS (or it might have been something that was much better than the Stalker UAS – I hadn’t been totally sure if he was comparing two drones at that time or not) which he’d managed to purloin from a nearby airforce base and which was streaming onto cameras J, K and L on computer ten, which was about three paces away from me.  Oh, and Yi was even more enthusiastic about the Stalker or whatever it was than any of the others because he was actually controlling it personally with what looked, honest to God, like an oversized remote control for a toy car.  The others were all being given directions from the main police station somewhere in the centre of Changsha but streaming to us and Yi was telling the people where he wanted the drones sent.

I had to admit the quality of the pictures (the ones I understood anyway) we were getting was good.  Some of them were in radar, which looked like an early version of the Asteroids computer game or possibly Space Invaders, and others in infrared, which I couldn’t help but grin at, and yet more in satellite imaging that reminded me of Google maps.

“But the reason I like this one best is because it can be recharged 24/7 while it’s still in the sky,” Yi finished up.  I gathered from the way he was his remote control that he was back to talking about the Stalker.

“Mmhmm.”  I nodded, polishing off the last of the croissant and wiping away crumbs, trying not to think about the inscrutable look Sehun had shot me that morning before leaving.  “Wait, you mean you never need to land the thing?”

Yi nodded and shrugged.  “Yeah, pretty much.”  He patted the remote control again.  “You can recharge it with a laser beam.”

“That is ing cool,” I said.  “I wish my phone would do that.”

He laughed, idly twitching one of the levers on his control box.  The camera views on computer ten shifted as the drone hovering somewhere over the city responded.

“Do you often get to work with drones?” I asked him.  “You seem to enjoy it.”  Understatement of the century.

“Not often enough.”  He pursed his lips.  “It was how we found Mr Lu’s aunt, actually.  Model of that one—” he pointed to computer thirteen, which was displaying no fewer than six cameras, “—has awesome infrared and motion sensors, even though it’s quite slow and a bit noisy.  Got it to fly over all the suspect places in Baoding – places that had been deserted, factories, warehouses, the like – and found several hundred people camped out in a place that was set for demolition in about a year and a half.  Obviously suspicious.”

“Any luck this time?”

Yi shook his head.  “No.  The head honcho learns from his mistakes, unfortunately, and he doesn’t often make the same one twice.  There’s a possibility the girls aren’t even in Changsha, and there’s an even higher possibility he won’t trade them back for Luhan.  There’s a lucrative market for brides in some areas of the country, among other things.”

It took a few minutes for exactly what he was talking about – and suggesting might happen to those poor girls – to sink in.  I coughed, trying to pretend bile wasn’t rising to my throat.

“That’s absolutely appalling.”

“I know,” he said grimly.  “Before I was assigned this case, I worked on one tracking down those kinds of people and freeing all the young women caught in their web.”

My respect for Yi was rising rapidly.  I also understood now why he drank so much.

“The worst part was the occasion I had to infiltrate the ring and pretend to be a part of them,” he mused.  But then he shook himself and a smile spread across his face.  “But the best part was finding the girls – and some boys, too – and getting them to safety.”  He cast me a sideways glance.  “I think the conversation’s getting a little heavy.  What do you do when you’re not pretending to be Mr Lu?”

“I’m a modern languages and philology student at UCL in London,” I admitted.  “Sounds mundane, compared to you.”

He laughed and returned his attention to the drone.

“Here,” he said, shoving the remote control in my direction.  “Want to try flying it?”

Yi figured the girls would have been “hidden in plain sight” if they were still in the city, since infrared and sensory images, backed up by corroborative investigations from a ground team, revealed nothing out of the ordinary or suspicious with any of the deserted large buildings the city had.  At lunch time, Yi called in for more drones to help with the investigation, though he was still letting me fly his Stalker.  I went to check on D.O. and give him food to find him shivering under the covers and plastered with sweat.

“I’m not hungry,” he complained as soon as he smelt the food.  His breathing was short and shallow, and with his feverish eyes, it made him look a little mad.  I made sure he took more medication before lending him Suho’s iPad so he could watch a film.

“You need to eat something,” I told him as I left the room.  He coughed, and it sounded like his insides were trying to escape.

“Maybe when it doesn’t feel like there’s an elephant sitting on my chest.”

It looked like he was wincing just before I closed the door, and I rubbed my throat, hoping that the itching inside it was out of sympathy rather than because I needed to cough too.

Returning to the living room, I discovered Yi deep in conversation with somebody over a headset as he deftly controlled the Stalker with the remote beside him.  Three of his lackeys were attending to the computers, one of them munching on some fast food.  I sat down quietly and waited for him to finish, since I wasn’t totally sure what it was best for me to do, and fished out Luhan’s phone, toying with the possibility of texting Sehun and asking how their meetings with the important city officials and parents of missing girls who were currently in Hunan were going.

For some reason, the prospect of texting Sehun seized me with pure terror and I nearly dropped the phone, so I texted Kai instead and got a very confused reply of “hyung, what the hell, you’re sitting right next to me.”  Cursing myself for being an idiot, I texted Luhan instead.

The reply came in English, which struck me as odd.

Dire.  I reckon we won’t be back until mid-evening.

Luhan looks like he’s going to have a mental meltdown.

I didn’t even have time to process the second message properly before a third one came through.

And by the way, the baby you’re holding in your background picture is super adorable.  Is he yours?

I gritted my teeth.  A month ago, I would have been able to identify the culprit as Kris, because he would have been the only one I was certain knew the word “dire”, but now it could be just about anybody, except perhaps Suho.  Kai and D.O. were obviously out, Kai because he was apparently oblivious to the phone swap and D.O. for obvious reasons, and I reckoned it probably wasn’t Sehun because he wouldn’t have assumed the baby was mine.  At least, I hoped he wouldn’t have done.  Besides, it was a bit disturbing somebody t